Silas Bennett’S Imperfect Season

By Curt Munson

August 1966: Silas Bennett, aged 16, was about to realize his dream of playing for his high school football teams varsity. The son of an alcoholic father and a mother who stood as a frail bulwark between her warring husband and son, Silas suddenly finds himself without either parent. Within sight of his goals, he is transplanted to a small Oklahoma town to live with the family of the only relative who would accept him, a sister he doesnt even remember. In his new town, Silas will also be near Mavis Cartwright, the girl who was his first and only love.
Eager to fit in, Silas believes football might serve as his entre into this new society, but first he must deal with a hostile coach and bullying teammates led by the their quarterback, Parker Justice, who is jealously guarding his relationship as Mavis boyfriend.
Filled with edge of your seat football games, contemporary details, and characters you may love or despise, but all of whom youll soon think you actually know, Silas Bennetts Imperfect Season is a book youll read again and again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546242956

Curt Munson

Retired Marine Curt Munson has authored two previous novels, Tales of the Wide A Wake Cafe an Oklahoma Book Awards finalist, and Battlefield Commission: Third Marine Amphibious Force. He is married, the father of two sons, and has three grandchildren.

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© 2018 Curt Munson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/20/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4296-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4294-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4295-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018906098

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

I have made no attempt to describe a particular person or place in this work of fiction. I’ve done the opposite. Stanton is an imaginary place, existing in my mind only. Every character is a creation of my imagination. The football games were never played, the opposing teams depicted as coming from real life towns were not inspired from life. Any similarity of names, characteristics, or place are purely coincidental and done for literary purposes only. If your name or job is described here in an unfavorable way, don’t get your panties into a knot; it isn’t you. I made it up.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Chapter 1 Silas

Chapter 2 Not Even a Bench Warmer

Chapter 3 Pryor

Chapter 4 A Stanton Tiger

Chapter 5 Wagoner

Chapter 6 Okmulgee

Chapter 7 Carlos Gonzales and Parker Justice

Chapter 8 Repercussions

Chapter 9 Joe Mitchum

Chapter 10 Homecoming Week

Chapter 11 Sallisaw and Henryetta

Chapter 12 The Old Man

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

DEDICATION

To my brothers, my children, and amateur athletes in every sport, driven to their highest achievement by their love of the game.

CHAPTER ONE

SILAS

I

1615 Houston Street

Muskogee, Ok.

Fall 1966

The first time my old man punched me with a closed fist, he hit me in the sternum. Even drunk, I’m pretty sure he didn’t want to explain facial bruising. In a way, it was a level of awareness making what he did even worse. The punch knocked every bit of breath out of my body, and sent me flying across the room. Fortunately, I landed on the sofa, so I didn’t wind up with a concussion, but I couldn’t breathe. I also felt like my heart had stopped. I lay there unable even to gasp for air for several seconds. He’d ordered me to go to the kitchen and get him a glass of water. I’d done it. When I handed it to him, he looked at the glass, flung the contents into my face and delivered the punch. Before I knew which end was up, he crossed the room, reached down and grabbed the front of my tee shirt and with his arm cocked and a fist the size of a small ham pulled menacingly back to his ear, he snarled, Where’s my fucking ice? He’d said nothing about ice, I was just supposed to know. That incident occurred around New Years in 1959. I was eight years old.

Both of my brothers served in Korea during the police action there. I was born a few months before they deployed to war. There was a chasm between us. After me, my mother told the old man, I’m done. They started sleeping apart, which would have been fine if we’d been rich and living in a big house, but we were white trash, and poor white trash to boot. The old man moved into the bedroom I’d have otherwise had to myself and kept me awake with his snoring until I moved out in 1966. Of course, I was a baby when they started sleeping apart, and knew no other way. I didn’t realize until I was almost grown that most couples didn’t do it that way.

The old man was almost fifty when I was born. He had very little patience with a kid who wasn’t born knowing everything he’d learned in his whole life, or, as a score of incidents like the one with the water showed, who couldn’t read his mind. He was also a big believer in sparing the rod and spoiling the child. If beatings worked, you’d think I’d be a much better person than I am. I don’t want to make it sound like he beat me all of the time. If she was there, Mom would get between us and protect me with her own body. He wasn’t afraid to scream at her, but I don’t remember him ever putting his hands on Mom. No matter how bad he got, she always had some power over him I did not understand.

By trade, he was a finish carpenter and cabinet-maker. He was really skilled at it. When I was young and times were good he was pretty busy and I worked with him starting when I was eight. He was always at his best when he was working, and I could almost see why children tended to idealize their fathers. On rare occasions he was even endearing. When times were bad, it was awful. Not only did he not make any money during recessions or self-imposed periods of unemployment, but he somehow remembered how much he liked to drink. Those were the times when a lot of the not sparing the rod stuff would happen.

I know the story of my early life makes both of my parents look bad. Maybe my mom should have protected me more, to include moving out, and taking me with her. I even begged her to do it, more than once. Her answer was always the same. We’re Baptists, you, me, even him although he doesn’t go to Church. We were married in a Baptist Church. God joined us together, Silas, and we were joined to be together as long as we both shall live; in good times and bad. This is our lot. Our job is to bloom where we are planted.

Blooming where you’re planted was one of Mom’s refrains. If you told me I heard her say it 10,000 times, I’d just shrug. I probably did. I quit the Baptist Church the day I moved out.

People in this day and age cannot understand a woman staying with someone like the old man. He wasn’t really from the generation before mine, the case with most people’s parents. He was born in 1900, and was from the generation before the one before mine. Mom, born in 1912, was a reflection of the values of her parents, and divorce was unheard of. You just didn’t do it. Her mother had begged Mom not to marry him. I finally determined, although he made more money, Grandpa was the same kind of SOB as the old man. Mom had gone from one jackass to another and they were the only kind of man she knew. Gramma saw more clearly than Mom had when she was eighteen, and I think Mom just wouldn’t admit her mother’d been right. Besides, if you do the math, you discover Mom was already pregnant with my brother Jim when they got married. Gramma relented after the pregnancy surfaced since to her, a lifetime of misery with a horrible man was better than the shame of illegitimacy. Go figure.

Mom’s parents died in a house fire when I was six. When the estate was settled among her brothers and sisters, Mom got a little over a thousand dollars. The old man expected her to hand it over. She laughed at him.

Her inheritance was the first money she’d ever had of her own. As soon as she deposited the check in her brand new bank account, she bought a used – very used Albert Fahr upright piano. When it arrived and was set up in our living room it looked like a stage prop for The Grapes of Wrath. It was a disaster.

I wish we could make this piano talk, she said as she was polishing it. The wood was beautiful underneath the dirt and grime.

Why? I asked.

Fahrs were made for the Imperial House of Germany. I’d give anything to know how this piano came to America. When I saw it, all covered with dust, out of tune, and with a couple of the piano wires broken, it was love at first sight. I’d told the used furniture man I had very little money and he brought me straight to this one. He had no idea what he had and when I saw the hallmark I almost fainted. He warned me it might not be tuneable. I almost laughed, but kept my face calm if a little worried looking and bought it anyway – for fifteen dollars less than he first asked. I had to figure if he didn’t know what he had then neither probably did the person who sold it to him. It wasn’t my job to educate him.

Mom brought in skillful people to repair and tune the instrument, both things putting a strain on her inheritance, and both of them charging more than Mom spent to buy the piano in the first place. She didn’t care, she said, it was still a bargain. When it was clean and working, the piano was easily the most beautiful and valuable thing we had in the house.

Then she began to play.

When she was in school, she’d dreamed of going to Julliard in New York. Instead, she married the old man. The trade-off boggles the mind. When Mom first began to play the Fahr, she was rusty, but within weeks, she was playing as well as anybody I’d heard on the radio. I loved to listen to her and see her happy when she was sitting at the keyboard. But she hadn’t bought the piano for herself. She bought it for me. Mom began teaching me immediately, and brought me along in both playing and theory. Even though it was a terrific pain to have to miss an hour of play or TV time every afternoon, I had an ear for the sound. Although I hadn’t inherited her ability to play songs she would hear once, with enough rehearsal I could play a good many songs without the music in front of me. With sheet music, I had a lot of range.

Despite my growing ability, I’d wanted to quit when I started junior high because I was playing organized football for the first time and I wanted to concentrate on it. In response, one Sunday afternoon, she and I went to the church and played the grand piano there. I’d thought it impossible anything could sound better than Mom on the old Fahr, but the richness of the sound bouncing around a sanctuary designed to magnify its resonance brought tears to my eyes. I never mentioned quitting again. Other than the afternoon at the church, my favorite memories occurred when the old man was out of the house and we would play duets on the old upright.

When I was eight, I walked into the kitchen one morning and there was a note next to the toaster from Mom. Gone to town. Get to school on time! That was it. No explanation to me; no explanation to the old man. I had toast and a bowl of cold cereal without milk and went to the bus stop. The old man spent the day roaring at the walls.

Mom was back when I got home from school, and the old man was even more furious than he’d been when I left in the morning. She was the most calm and in control I’d ever seen her. I found out later, she’d gone to the federal building and taken the civil service exam. Less than two months later, she was working for the post office, and we had regular money coming in for the first time in my life. The old man had been adamant no wife of his was going to shame him by working.

He even told her he’d get her fired, and he did try to sabotage her job. For years he’d held her lack of earning power over her head, and he’d mistaken acquiescence for her being cowed. He was wrong. On her first day, he called twice in half an hour. When he called again fifteen minutes later, she told the person who’d answered the phone to just hang up. Less than a half hour later, he showed up at the post office, drunk and loudly demanding she come home and fix his lunch. Mom never even spoke to him. Instead, she called the sheriff, a high school classmate of hers and the old man got to spend the night in jail.

I’d never even heard of a restraining order back then, but when she went to get him the next morning, she had one with her stipulating if he came within 300 feet of the post office he would be subject to arrest. Furthermore, he could not call her nor bother her in any way while she was at work. The first arrest – the one from the previous day, was granted status as a misdemeanor; subsequent arrests would subject him to felony convictions to include up to two years in prison for each violation, including the first one. Even today, I don’t know if any of it was legally on the up and up, but the sheriff was an old friend of mom’s. Whether it was true or not, when the old man walked out of jail he was almost twenty hours away from his last drink and he didn’t like the feeling. He stayed away. He still whined about her tearing his balls off in front of the whole city (the few people who even knew him could not have cared less), but like the sleeping together thing, when Mom was determined, there was no stopping her.

After she went to work, things were – while not perfect at our house, more or less regular. The best part was we always had food in the place. Federal safety nets like food stamps and WIC were far in the future. Poor people – then as now, tended to be hungry.

Mom had surprised me by demonstrating she knew how to drive, something I’d never known until the day she drove the old man’s truck to take the civil service exam. Further declaring her independence, Mom bought a nine-year-old Chevy, started depositing her paychecks in her checking account in only her name, and doled out money to the old man about like she might have given an allowance to a child. Except, I was their child and I never got an allowance. When he complained, she would tell him to go to work and he’d have his own money.

After Mom started with the post office, the old man only rarely got desperate enough to go to work. As time went by and he got less and less reliable, nobody would hire him anyway. Despite everything, he did have his own money. Sort of. On three separate occasions, he tore the house apart until he found the money from my newspaper route I was trying to save to buy myself some clothes for school. My goal was to remove some pressure from Mom. Each time I’d think I had a new hiding place he’d never uncover, but drunks trying to get high can be pretty ingenious. About the time I was turning 15, he qualified for Social Security. As a result, he had a few hundred dollars on the third of every month and his drunks became dangerous. Not just to Mom and me. To him too. Drunks without an off switch can easily kill themselves. I waited for it to happen, but it never did.

With Mom working, school became my sanctuary. When school let out for the summer, she needed to be able to put me somewhere safe. The first summer after she got her job was particularly difficult, because she was going to be in a federal training program in Phoenix. Even if she’d been able to be home weekends, she’d have still needed flexible child care, a non-existent element in the late 50s when most moms just stayed home with their kids. Had there been proper care, the cost would have exhausted Mom’s income. Neither of my brothers could take me, so Mom turned to my sister for help. I’d always known I had a sister, but I didn’t know her. Laura was my closest sibling, 13 years my senior. She had left home before I was old enough to remember her by marrying when she was sixteen. By the time Mom needed her help, she and her husband, Phil, were living in Illinois while he did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He was swamped with work and they had a baby girl already. The presence of an energetic, homesick eight year old would have been wildly disruptive. Laura suggested an alternative plan. Instead of going to Chicago, we drove the twenty-five miles to Stanton, over in Cherokee County. There we met my sister, who took us to a farm in the country. The place was owned by Phil’s parents, Virginia and Jed Cartwright. The old woman immediately insisted I call her Nana. When Mom left to go home, I was left behind. I had never been so lonely and I was terrified. The family called Jed G’dad and so did I. They’d lived on the farm outside Stanton, Oklahoma since 1919 when Jed had returned from France after the War to End All Wars. In the morning, G’dad left with Laura to take her to the train so she could return to her life in Chicago and Nana and I went out to collect eggs. Afterwards, I settled in to life on the farm. Each morning, Nana and I would collect eggs, some we ate, some we sold. G’dad allowed me to follow him around which I did like a shadow. I never really understood the relationship I had with Nana and G’dad, but their habit of loving others gathered me into its embrace immediately and I accepted it.

Before we departed for church the first Sunday I was with them, Nana told me they had a family tradition of sharing Sunday lunch at the farm. Their oldest son, Reggie and his family would be there after church, and I’d get to meet Mavis, their daughter who was just my age. Nana was certain I would love her. Mavis was my age, but more mature and incredibly bossy. She immediately took charge of me and to keep peace, I let her. It was not love at first sight – it actually took a couple of hours. Nana told me Mavis was my cousin, but I’d never had relatives before, so the term meant nothing to me.

For the rest of the summer, I stayed at the farm with my Nana and G’dad. When school started again, I went back to my life in Muskogee. I cried when I left. In its way, living at the farm made my other life much more difficult. I learned there were homes where people weren’t afraid.

For five years, I continued to return to the farm for the summer. As time went by, I learned how to do things and G’dad constantly told me I was earning my keep. Whether true or not, I believed him. I learned to operate the tractors, the truck and the irrigation equipment. We baled hay, supervised the picking of strawberries and green beans, I even paid the workers who were compensated by the pound for the crops they harvested. We repaired fences, maintained the equipment and kept the place in working order. I loved being with G’dad, but my favorite part, always, was the time I spent with Mavis. In many ways we became inseparable. Elizabeth would frequently arrive with Mavis before we’d had breakfast just to shut her up, or I’d be taken to town to be with her. We started playing doctor the summer we were nine, and continued until we were 13 when her mother walked in on us, both naked with me holding a toy stethoscope to her chest.

I was returned to Muskogee so quickly my butt scarcely touched down anywhere. The old man was in one of his infrequent periods of sobriety and decided he wanted me to go to work with him. At age 13, I started working a 40 hour week.

II

The summer I turned fourteen I went to work for a commercial nursery. The old man had fallen off the wagon (again) and I wanted a job where I’d get paid. At the nursery, it was me and a revolving cast of illegals from Central America and Mexico. I told the guy who hired me I was 16 and he didn’t check. I figured if the Department of Labor came out, one 14 year old white kid was not going to be the nursery’s biggest problem. I was fully immersed in Spanish from the moment I came to work until I went home. I left the nursery with a comprehensive Spanish profanity vocabulary, and a fair comprehension and utility of spoken Spanish even if the sentences didn’t have the word puta in them. When I began taking Spanish classes in school, I learned you could speak ghetto Spanish just like you could speak ghetto English. My Spanish teacher was unimpressed.

The nursery shipped trees and shrubbery all over the country and the operation was huge. I spent the summer with several other men running alongside a lowboy tractor trailer rig throwing bagged trees and shrubs onto the trailer where they would be stacked closely together by others. If it sounds tough, add 100 degree heat. I considered myself in training for fall football, so I stayed almost all summer. A couple of weeks before fall training began, the old man got hired to finish some cabinets on a project getting hopelessly behind schedule. He made me quit the nursery and go with him as his gofer. One day, the contractor, who’d worked with the old man before and thought he could control him, sat down next to me when I was eating my sandwich at lunch and asked me if I wanted to work for him after the job was over. By then, proximity to the other tradesmen had taught me to say, Not only yes, but Hell yes! What I actually said was, Not only yes, and then I smiled.

He stuck out his hand and said, Call me Joe. Joe Mitchum mostly used me to police up the various job sites the rest of the summer and on weekends. He paid me out of his pocket, more than minimum wage, and he always rounded my hours up My memory of G’dad had begun to fade by this time, and along the way, Joe Mitchum became my new beau ideal. Joe was big, strong, sober, and successful. He was the father I wished I’d had.

When school let out the summer after my freshman year I started working for Joe a bit more than full time. I knew he felt sorry for me when he’d hired me the previous year, but I didn’t care what his reason was. My second summer with him, he paid me two bucks an hour and gave me 40 hours a week and some overtime at time and a half. Mostly I was what he called a utility infielder. In fact, I was a utility fill-in. Whenever he needed somebody to fill out a crew or do work nobody else wanted to do, he put me on the task. I was so grateful for the work I was determined I’d show him I was worth every penny. He worked my butt off those three months, but I loved it. During those months I did everything from framing a house to laying brick – and most of the jobs in between. I began to think someday I’d become a contractor myself. I banked over a thousand dollars during the summer, comparing favorably to the seventy-five cents an hour comprising minimum wage in jobs I couldn’t have gotten anyway because I wasn’t sixteen. When school started again, I went back to weekend part time work and started thinking about buying myself an automobile when I turned 16. Ironically, when I finally had enough money to get myself some school clothes I didn’t do it. I bought two pairs of jeans because I’d outgrown the old ones, and a couple of shirts; period. The rest I was saving to buy a car and I kept my money in the bank.

During the summer following my Sophomore year, Joe saw me as an apprentice everything. Whatever he needed, I would go and do. I framed houses, worked with a bricking crew, put up sheetrock, I even built cabinets, something the old man had taught me to do by example and chore before he became unable to hold his tools safely and became a hazard to himself.

III

Just before the 1967 car models were released in the fall of 1966, Mom bought a new car. It was the first new car we’d ever had. Mom learned early in her USPS career the civil service posted available jobs and what they paid. You could also be promoted by demonstrating you knew what you were doing on examinations. For someone like my mother, it was the professional equivalent of opening the turnstile on a superhighway. She began moving up almost immediately after she was hired. In 1965, Mom saw a notice for a new postmaster in Redbird, one of the little towns surrounding Muskogee. Mom jumped at the opportunity. It turns out she could have taken her time since nobody else wanted to be postmaster of an all black community. That sort of prejudice simply never occurred to her. She got the job, and the new car was a way to celebrate her raise in pay.

She took me with her to shop because she told me I’d be driving the new car on dates and so forth, and she wanted it to be one I liked as well. It was going to be an economy car, but Detroit produced lots of them in those years. When we got to City Chevrolet, we were through looking. Still on the floor of the showroom, there was a brand new 1966 Chevy II Nova Super Sport the dealer was eager to get off his lot to make room for the ’67s about to arrive. Nineteen sixty-six was the first year the Chevy II, their low end automobile, had it’s body designed by the Fisher group, famous for designing Chevy’s more expensive models. Comparing the Chevy II with a Ford Falcon was unfair. The automotive equivalent to pitting Johnny Unitas against the quarterback from Mudflap High. For me, it was love at first sight. I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t my money, but Mom shushed out my reaction and turned serious.

The salesman spoke politely with Mom for a couple of sentences before he doomed his own prospects by asking her, When can your husband come in to see the car?

Is it illegal to sell cars to women in America? She asked.

Well, no, of course not, it’s just not the way we normally do business. I’m sure you understand women tend to be too emotional, and then when their husbands see what they’ve done, we can wind up getting the car back. It’s bad for everyone, the bilious bastard explained. Lucky for him, he didn’t address her as ‘little lady.’ It might have cost him an ear.

If my son and I go to Tulsa, she asked as nice as pie, do you think we could find this car or one like it and buy it from a salesman who isn’t an ass? Mom’s tone of voice had not changed an iota, but I could tell she was ticked off. I settled in to watch the show about to begin and tried to keep from smiling.

The guy literally did a double take like comedians Jackie Gleason or Red Skelton were famous for doing on TV. Unsure what he’d just heard from this prim looking lady, he never recaptured the initiative. Before he could recover or even resume his unctuous persona, Mom insisted on speaking with the sales manager.

A common sales technique used broadly in the industry both back then and even today involves negotiating a deal with the salesman he must get signed off by the manager. Whereupon, the salesman is thrown out of the boss’ office for trying to give the damned car away usually shouted loudly enough for the customer to hear it. This would lead to a new series of negotiations starting higher than the price the potential buyer had spent an hour and most of his or her energy arriving at earlier. Mom was having none of it.

The sales manager arrived shortly. Mom was seated at the sales desk and dismissed the salesman with a nod of her head. Chastened, he looked to his boss who nodded in turn, and he deservedly lost a commission.

My name is Heloise Bennett, I am the postmistress at the United States Post Office in Redbird. I have twenty-three people working for me, and I resent being patronized. I have been with USPS for eight years and I have pay stubs for the past year in my purse. Please tell me which part of my litany makes me unqualified to buy a car without my husband’s permission.

"None of it makes you anything but a qualified buyer serving …